on our psychic survival

We know that some people’s psychic survival – everybody’s psychic survival some of the time – depends on their capacity to humiliate others, to make others experience what they have suffered, as a way to reassure themselves that they are now the humiliators rather than the humiliated, to ‘convert trauma into triumph’ (in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s terms), to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control, the trauma of being a child into the false triumph of being an adult